GELFAND’S WORLD- A few years ago, a group calling itself Clean Sweep argued that the voters of Los Angeles should defeat all the incumbents and replace them with fresh blood. On Tuesday, the results came close. There are two distinct lessons, one of which is quite ominous for elected officials.
This election demonstrated the end of voter patience over recession era governmental financing. City Councilman Tom LaBonge couldn't get the streets repaired in Council District 4 because the city can barely fund its understaffed police and fire services. Voters got the chance to express their anger against the status quo by targeting incumbent office holders and their proxies. His chief of staff took the hit in Tuesday's election.
The other lesson is that this was the final nail in the coffin for any defense of doing municipal elections in odd numbered years. The LAUSD vote was actually in the single digits, a turnout of 7.64% with all precincts reporting. Some precincts got less than 10 votes.
The low turnout did not help the incumbents. I'm counting City Council District 4 candidate Carolyn Ramsey as the equivalent of an incumbent because she had worked for the incumbent and had the endorsements of all the power groups and wealthy elite. She finished 7 points behind previously unknown David Ryu. In the School Board runoffs, the only thing that kept the bloodbath from achieving totality was that incumbent Dick Vladovic had the remarkable luck to go up against a little known and obviously underfunded opponent. Otherwise it would have been four out of four in the Davids knocking off the Goliaths. And Vladovic was leading by less than 2000 votes at the end of election night.
In some other year, the School Board results would be laughed off as the iPad elections. The LAUSD hasn't been getting a lot of favorable publicity these past few years, what with the revolving door superintendents and the millions of dollars that have obviously been going to waste. If you are Tamar Galatzan, how are you going to defend the performance of the board as a whole? Bennett Kayser had less need to defend his performance, but he ran up against a well funded opponent. Only Vladovic held onto an incumbent seat on the board, and that may be attributable to the fact that his campaign flooded the district with glossy postcards bragging about his endorsements. His opponent was not in a position to compete.
Even for the school board elections, public fatigue with recession era funding had its place. If there were lots of money, a few million here and there would be less of an issue, but those iPad costs stood large in public perception. People have been complaining about the loss of government services, including public school improvements, for half a dozen years. But there was in general some understanding that in the midst of a worldwide economic downturn, cuts had to be made. This week's vote suggests that people are less willing to accept this as a fact, and more determined to ask for a return to the old days. In short, residents of Los Angeles seem to have hit the wall in terms of the ongoing limits of government funding.
It's true that the massive unemployment and economic downturn of the late 2000s is starting to go away. There are fewer newly unemployed, and property values have recovered. But the city budget continues to be a disaster. Year after year, the City Council begins with a projected shortfall and whittles budgeted spending down by a couple of hundred million dollars. A lot of this goes back to the disastrous labor agreement from eight years ago, something which Carolyn Ramsey had nothing to do with. She paid the electoral price for that agreement in Tuesday's election, while the actual architects have gone on to the congress and the mayor's office, or to well funded pensions.
The result of a city budget that is always in crisis is deferred maintenance -- everything from water mains to cracked streets to books at the public libraries. And the City of Los Angeles remains famous for its understaffed police force and the LAPD's inability to get officers to situations in the field.
The big picture is that elected officials will be experiencing less patience among a more demanding set of voters. I think we are seeing voter fatigue at a new level. It's not just the fact that the school district makes the Keystone Kops look like a disciplined force, it's the fact that we have all endured a recession that is prolonged by any historical standard.
The effects of the recession have worn down the traditional relationship between the government and the citizens. The city of Los Angeles has barely been scraping by, and the residents of CD4 got tired of hearing excuses. When the elected officials and their staff won't even make promises anymore, because they know the cupboard is bare, it's hard to run on your record of accomplishments.
The other side of the education Discussion
By an odd coincidence, the election which rebuffed the education establishment was held on the same day as the California State Science Fair. The Fair is the other side of the education coin. It includes about a thousand of California's smartest, most dedicated young people, assembled to present their work and compete for scholarship money.
It's always an impressive event, and this year was no exception.
As one of the judges explained, you have to agree that it's cool when a couple of tenth graders have discovered their own planet in a far off star system.
There were high school students who have mastered the art of data mining, but not to sell you advertising. They are looking through publicly available listings of genes in order to figure out ways of developing new vaccines or discovering chemotherapeutic agents.
The fact that several thousand students managed to compete effectively in county science fairs and then at the state level does not, in and of itself, argue that education is doing well at every level, or that it is successful all over the state. But it does show that when given the tools, our California students are competitive with anybody.
One conclusion became clear from talking to student contestants on Tuesday. The summer science programs are a plus, not only to the students but potentially to our state's culture and economy. The STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs in the state's schools are underequipped and underfunded, but when and where they exist, they become successful.
At some point, the economy will be recovered, and incumbent school board members can relax a bit as election day approaches. And at that time -- when there is a little extra money to spend -- it will be nice to see the STEM programs properly funded.
Addendum on Luis Lang and Obamacare
Luis Lang is the South Carolina resident who failed to get health insurance and had to do crowd funding to raise money for his eye surgery. The news story about Lang that ran in the Charlotte Observer quickly went viral, and provoked a national discussion about the role of personal responsibility vs. governmental intrusion in the medical insurance industry. Lang had been portrayed as a conservative Republican who rejected Obamacare on political grounds.
The reality may have been a little more nuanced than that, as later reports indicate. A story titled "Lifelong Republican turns on his party, embraces Obamacare" suggests that Lang is moving towards a more liberal perspective in which medical care is considered a societal need, and governmental intervention is a plus. According to the Think Progress piece, Lang actually tried to enroll in Obamacare last year, but was not able to do so because of the technical difficulties.
This may not be the perfect excuse, but it is something. Lang offers a useful critique of the current system, which is that some people (such as him) have a difficult time estimating their future income, and this raises difficulties in an already complicated system.
This is a legitimate point, and one that congressional Republicans could fix if they could get over being obstinate. On the other hand, Lang's state of South Carolina could join the Obamacare option which would have provided Medicaid to Lang and to tens of thousands of other South Carolina residents. Perhaps Lang's story will move South Carolina towards a more humane approach to marginally employed people. I won't be holding my breath on this, but it could happen.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 42
Pub: May 22, 2015
